


Pressure Points

by Sholio



Series: The Epic Post-Series Road Trip of DOOM [4]
Category: Iron Fist (TV)
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Season/Series 02, Seasickness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-10
Updated: 2019-07-10
Packaged: 2020-05-12 01:44:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19219072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: For my h/c bingo "motion sickness" square. (Nothing graphic.) In which Ward's life continues to find new and interesting ways to suck.





	Pressure Points

When Ward was a kid, he'd found out the hard way that he was prone to seasickness when the Meachum and Rand families had gone for a day trip on a family friend's yacht.

On the bright side, what bright side there was, he'd gotten fussed over by Mrs. Rand the way she normally fussed over Danny. She settled him in the yacht's small cabin and put a cold cloth on his forehead. It was sort of like he vaguely remembered having a mom had been like.

Far more annoying was the anxious, fascinated hovering of the two smaller children. Ward could cheerfully have strangled them if he'd had the strength to move.

"Don't coddle the boy, Heather," his father said from the doorway. "He's only malingering for the attention."

Mrs. Rand rose with a sigh and patted Ward's shoulder. "Get some sleep, honey, and call me if you need anything."

She herded the little kids out, or so he thought, but either she'd missed one or Danny snuck back, because some indeterminate amount of misery later, he heard rustling and opened his eyes to find Danny staring at him with wide, worried eyes.

"Are you dying?" Danny whispered.

"Yes," Ward snapped. "Go away."

Danny hesitated, and then with a small child's solemnity, he pushed up his sleeve and tugged at something on his wrist. "My mom gave me this before we got on the boat. She said it's supposed to help me not get sick. And I'm not sick, so I guess it works. I thought maybe you could wear it for awhile?"

He held out a motion sickness band. Ward stared at it for a minute, and then took it, because hell, maybe it _did_ work. He was prepared to try anything at this point, including jumping off the yacht.

"Go away," he said wearily, closing his eyes. He clutched the bracelet for a minute and then pulled it over his wrist.

When he opened his eyes some time later, Danny was gone, and it did seem like he felt better, a little.

 

***

 

"I am so, so, so sorry about this, Ward."

Ward glared balefully at Danny without raising his head, which was resting on his arm on the railing of the ferry. He felt wrung out and exhausted; although it wasn't cold, he was shivering in the saltwater spray. "Yeah, that sure helps a lot, thanks."

"I forgot you get seasick. We could've flown between the islands, or -- I don't know, I could have gone by myself. I just didn't think."

"Yeah, well, I could've said something too," Ward admitted. He clenched his teeth. "This is fun. How much longer?"

"Um ... about three hours, I guess?"

"Awesome." He turned his sweaty forehead into the crook of his arm and wished Danny would leave already.

"Hey, Ward ..."

"Unless you have Dramamine in your pocket, I'd like to be alone."

"I don't, but ..." Danny nudged him with a bottle of water. "C'mon, drink something. You'll get dehydrated."

"Go away," Ward said, but he took the bottle and pressed it against his forehead.

"So I had an idea," Danny said, because apparently this was going to be one of those times when he had the subtlety and attention to nuance of an overly friendly St. Bernard dog.

"Does it involve me throwing you over this railing? Because --"

"Ward, listen. Remember when we were kids and went on that boat ride, and you got so sick?"

"Thanks for reminding me. That's definitely what I want to think about right now."

"I had one of those motion sickness wristbands and I gave it to you, remember? Did it help?"

"I dunno," Ward muttered. "Maybe? I'd rather not dwell on it, thanks."

"But it did make it better?"

"A little," he admitted. "Yeah, I guess it did."

"Right, so, the way those work is through pressure points, right? And I studied pressure points in K'un Lun, quite a lot actually, not just for fighting but also medicinally --"

"Pressure points are not _medicine --"_

"-- so the point is, give me your hand, Ward."

Ward did, because he felt shitty enough that it wasn't like it could get _worse,_ and hell, maybe it'd help. Anyway, he'd learned by now that going along with Danny's bonkers ideas was usually easier than fighting about it, and at least this one didn't seem likely to get them thrown into jail or captured by cultists.

Danny took his wrist in a firm grip and dug his fingertips in, feeling around until he found the places he wanted to press on. It was actually kind of interesting to watch him do it, or at least distracting.

"It might take a little while, if it helps at all," Danny said in a vaguely apologetic tone. "Why don't you sit down? Or better yet, lie down. You can nap or something."

"I'm not sure if this is a good idea," Ward complained, but he allowed himself to be led away from the railing, with the water bottle dangling from his free hand. There wasn't anywhere to sit aside from the deck itself, as it wasn't really meant to be a passenger boat. Danny eventually found them a heap of canvas piled up with some ropes, and got them settled on it, Ward lying down and Danny sitting beside him. Danny carefully pulled a fold of the canvas over Ward's legs, like a sort of blanket. He kept hold of Ward's wrist the entire time.

"You know, back then with the -- with the bracelet," Ward said, trying to focus on the clouds overhead rather than the rolling of the deck under them. "Did you go ahead and get sick? After you gave it to me." He hadn't even wondered about it, then.

"No, it didn't really seem to bother me. I guess I had my sea legs by then."

"Oh. Well. Good." Of course Danny didn't get seasick; it just figured. He felt like he should be more jealous than he was -- and he was aware that once upon a time, he would have been; he could feel the ghost of that old jealousy sometimes, like the pain of a phantom limb. But it wasn't like Danny being miserable would have made him feel any better. There might as well be one of them who didn't feel like shit right now.

They stayed there for a little while in silence, and Ward drifted. He still felt horrible, but he also was kind of sleepy and ... huh. If he felt decent enough to fall asleep, he actually might not feel quite as awful anymore.

Danny leaned over him, a halo of curls against the bright sky, and Ward blinked himself back from the edge of sleep. "Is it helping? It's helping, isn't it? Your color's a little better."

"I don't know," Ward said, refusing to give Danny the satisfaction of knowing that his idiotic pressure-point suggestion actually seemed to be doing something. 

Danny broke into a grin, which made Ward wonder why he even bothered lying to him; it never seemed to work. At some point Danny had gotten into a (presumably) more comfortable position, stretched alongside Ward on the wadded-up canvas, propped on one elbow with his other hand wrapped around Ward's wrist.

"Aren't your fingers getting tired or something?"

"Nah," Danny said. "They used to have me do endurance exercises in K'un Lun all the time. I'm used to it."

Ward decided not to touch that one. "So you're just going to sit there and hold my wrist for the entire ..." He checked his watch, which involved moving Danny's hand somewhat, then realized that he couldn't remember when they were due into port anyway. "... however much longer that it takes us to finish this hell-trip?"

"It's not that different from what I was going to do anyway," Danny pointed out. "I've already seen everything there is to see on this boat; it's not very big. So yeah, I was just going to sit and look at the ocean or read a book anyway, and if this is making you feel better, I can do it just as easily here. I don't mind."

"Why are you so _nice?"_

Danny just laughed, letting Ward's irritation roll off him as it usually did. "Go to sleep, Ward. You'll feel better."

He already did, a lot, which was both incredibly annoying and such a fucking relief he could've cried. He had a feeling it wasn't just the pressure points; Danny had implied from time to time that even without the Iron Fist, he did things with chi to hurry his own healing along (there was _no way_ anyone with a broken leg should be out of the hospital in a week, high-tech brace or not), and Ward had a feeling Danny was doing more than just holding his wrist. He wasn't going to ask, because first of all, he knew he was going to hate the explanation, and second, it was _working_ , and he wasn't about to do anything to jeopardize that, at least not until they were back on solid ground.

So instead he just said, "Fine, wake me up if ninjas attack or something," and closed his eyes, with Danny close beside him, holding his wrist, steady and warm.


End file.
